Category: books
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– – ––The Woman…………………………..by Robert Creeley I have neverclearly given to youthe associationsyou have for me, you with suchdivided presence my dreamdoes not showyou. I do not dream. I have compoundedthese sensations, theaccumulation of the thingsleft me by you. Always…
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In Alias Grace (1996), Margaret Atwood answers from a woman’s perspective: [Y]ou may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for…
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‘Honour of the cucumber’ ‘Cucumber sandwiches’ — often a simplistic avatar of the English upper class in literature. I have never had one, have you? ’[P]oems are worth all the cucumber-sandwiches in the world […] the perfect green circles —…
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David Nicholls opens his hypnotic One Day (2009) with the following quote from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. How apt. That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine…
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Kyoko Mori answers in One Bird (1995): I raise my left arm and begin to wave as the birds disappear over the neighbor’s houses, and my eyes ache from staring into the sky. I know they will be back among the…
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. The title of Allan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty (2004) is a reference to William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1801): . the wavering line, which is a line more productive of beauty […], as in flowers, and other…
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– Re-reading Eddie’s poem “Whose Woods These Are”, I am reminded of what Umberto Eco says in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods:1 There are two ways of walking through a wood. The first is to try one or several…
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– “The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.” “Intemperance in…
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–– See this post about a famous parrot in the literary world. In Paul West’s Lord Byron’s Doctor (1989), J. W. Polidori writes, ‘He [Byron] never actually said Pretty Polly, but it was in his eye, all right, and I suppose I was a…
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–Not entirely true. It seems to me that not only is largeness itself never willing to be large and small at the same time, but also that the largeness in us never admits the small, nor is it willing to…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated. ‘Love is a standing, or still growing light / And his first…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: He felt unreal in London, as though his flesh and blood were in abeyance, as though he was a simulacrum of a boy, floating along Gower Street with its prim houses, dodging…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: Money was freedom. Money was aesthetic. Money was Arab stallions, not rough cobs. Money was not being shouted at. […] Money was freedom. Money was life. -p. 59 How poor can one…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: The parents […] found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with…
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Click the image to learn more about the object – – “It’s easy for an ungrateful recipient to become unworthy of a gift, and conversely, a gift given without worthy intentions is one which can be rejected as worthless.” (p.…
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Derek Walcott is one of my favourite contemporary poets and “No Opera” is a relatively new poem by him, published in the February 2010 issue of The Believer and collected in White Egrets: No Opera No opera, no gilded columns, no wine-dark seats, no Penelope…
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Isobel Armstrong praises photography; and a certain person’s justification of her obsession with (her own) images. “The very fact that [the photograph] emerges from a fleeting moment in time means that that time is irrevocably lost. Even to exchange the…
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In One Day (2009), David Nicholls answers: “It would be inappropriate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging…
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“The Swing” (1767) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard Harold Bloom (1994) sums up Johan Huizinga’s summary of the properties of play: 1) freedom2) disinterestedness3) excludedness or limitedness4) orderJohan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1944), p. 13: Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity…
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“Oysters” by Edouard Manet, 1862 Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? What? Apart from this? Sarah Waters in Tipping the Velvet (1998) tells us more: I opened no more shells for Kitty, for she managed them herself. ‘Look…
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Drawing for The Exquisite Corpse by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Hérold and Yves Tanguy, 1935. HOW TO OPEN AT WILL THE WINDOW ONTO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES IN THE WORLD AND ELSEWHERE With a large brush spread black gouache,…
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“Temptation”, from a German version of the Vita of Adam & Eve. Marina Warner in the article “Bananas” (1995) answers: In the seventeenth century, when savants were as keen on gardening as on the Bible, the general opinion of herbalists…
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Warning: the material below may disturb some. Angela Carter (1878 1978) in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History answers: Many pornographic novels are written in the first person as if by a woman, or use a woman as the…
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– 0 The generous giver’s identity has been revealed. Thank you!
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– John Guillory in “It Must Be Abstract” has the following to say about ‘pleasures’: Complex pleasures may be mixtures of pleasure and pain, but complex pleasures are only preferable to simple ones when it is complex pleasures that we…
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In 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (2010), John Sutherland uses Andrew Marvell’s poem “To his Coy Mistress” to illustrate the idea of ‘double bind’ (pp. 132-135). Had we but world enough timethis coyness, lady, were no crime. […] But…
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閱詩要配烈酒 –
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In the final paragraph of his London: The Biography (2001), Peter Ackroyd answers: [W]hen it is asked how London can be a triumphant city when it has so many poor, and so many homeless, it can only be suggested that…
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In a chapter about London’s sexy life (Chapter 41 “You sexy thing”), Peter Ackroyd relates some of Boswell’s sexual encounters. Boswell’s diary of street life in 1762 provides an account of sexual favours currently on offer. On the evening of…
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